Well people, as you can see, there hasn’t been an update on the Project in some months. This is due to several planned major events in the Project coordinator’s personal life over the past few months, one of which is still to happen in January. There has actually been a considerable amount of work happening in the background. One of the most notable Project activities for this period occurred in October when maps were put together showing the route of the historical Taupo Totara Timber Co railway from Putaruru to Mokai. This happened in conjunction with historian Paul Mahoney’s field trip with a small group of researchers to the area in the first week of November. A great deal of knowledge was gained about the historical route of this railway from the usual technique of producing georeferenced mosaics of old aerial photos of the area which date from around the time the railway ceased operation, and were obtained directly from Linz.

The web maps have not been updated in a few months, partly due to technical issues with the computer that carries out the builds. This computer is soon to get new disks installed, so it is felt best that the timeline for resuming web map updating is pushed out past then. The Project also hopes to upgrade the web maps to show a current location for use when travelling with a handheld device on or in the vicinity of rail corridors; this will be tested alongside the acquisition of a new handheld GPS that can be used with a Garmin app to show real-time location in areas where there is no cellphone coverage.

Other activities in which the Project’s maps have been tested and trialled recently include rail excursions to Dunedin and Kaikoura, and the possibility of Arthurs Pass and a second trip to Dunedin being travelled in the next couple of months are being considered at present. The type of map being used for these trips has been GPS location GPX files (created from the Locations layers for each corridor) loaded into a handheld device with the Webmaps aerial coverage as a backup due to inconsistent cellphone coverage in areas travelled.

So whilst work on the Project has slowed down a lot in the past few months, it is shortly to pick up again and whilst the production of web maps is also a bit slower of late, that should be resuming early in the new year.